Juanita J. Craft Civil Rights House and Museum
Our studio collaborated with the City of Dallas on a permanent exhibition for the newly renovated Juanita J. Craft Civil Rights House and Museum. The museum narrates the life and work of Juanita Craft, a pioneering activist who led the charge for equal rights and dignity for Black Americans—locally in Dallas and across the nation, establishing 182 chapters of the NAACP. The museum—slated to become the only site in Texas on the Civil Rights Trail—immerses visitors in eight decades of civil rights history, honoring Juanita Craft’s legacy by recreating her “house of power” as a contemporary site for memory, celebration, and activism.
The Challenge
In 2018, a devastating flood wreaked havoc on the house as well as critical objects on display, many of which were preserved and cherished by Mrs. Craft herself. We worked with a team of preservation architects, conservators, and city officials to curate, write, design, and install the new permanent display, elevating the house and objects to the stature of a world-class museum.
Project Vision
In Juanita Craft’s lifetime, her house served as a home base for generations of young activists striving to find their place in the civil rights struggle. Mrs. Craft always said, “I had no children, so I adopted the world.” This exhibit continues the legacy of civic transformation, presenting a vast and complex history with clarity, while also ensuring accessibility for a range of audiences and ages. The graphic design evokes the excitement of Mrs. Craft’s scrapbooks, deploying bold color, silhouette cutouts, and uplifting typography. The narrative tracks American history from enslavement and racial violence to legal victories and community liberation. We created a custom typeface called Craft for the exhibit titles, based on lettering from the physical silkscreen Mrs. Craft and her “Craft Kids” used to print protest signs. The two weights of the typeface augment exhibition didactics, physical signage, and donor recognition with a distinctive sense of time and place.
The design draws a connection between Juanita Craft’s childhood experiences with racism and her desegregation efforts in Dallas and beyond.
Craft, a custom typeface in two weights, based on an original screenprinting screen used to print protest posters in Juanita Craft’s house of power.
Design + Execution
Custom casework made from African Sapele wood is a major component of the exhibition architecture, designed to display and protect precious historic objects Juanita Craft collected throughout her life. The metalwork’s matte charcoal finish and distinctive half-arch structural supports are inspired by mid-century Modern furniture Mrs. Craft owned, including a wood and metal “New Domestic” sewing machine. Floor cases stand in the center of rooms, allowing visitor access from all directions, while wall-mounted cases cantilever off the museum walls, suspending objects weightlessly at eye level. The cases and exhibition lighting are finely calibrated to protect original objects from the Juanita Craft Collection, including a hand painted tintype of Mrs. Craft as an infant, a protest sign used in lunch counter demonstrations, a handbag with a sticker that reads “Pay Your Poll Tax,” and a scrapbook documenting a visit to the White House.
Benches and shelves create a Legacy Library where school groups and visitors are encouraged to contemplate their own role in the civil rights struggle.
Conservation-grade African Sapele casework exhibits original objects Mrs. Craft treasured, including a scrapbook documenting a White House visit and glasses she wore the day before she died.
Projected archival video, Mrs. Craft’s poll tax handbag, and archival imagery recount desegregation efforts in public schools and accommodations.
In the kitchen, a redesigned spice rack is viewable from two rooms and doubles as a donor recognition wall.
A set of interactive clipboards encourages visitors to grow their own dreams, based on Juanita Craft’s legacy.
Project Details
Design Team
Isometric Studio
Photo Credits
Isometric Studio
Open Date
May 20, 2023